Air Force Wants You to Design Its Next-Gen Sensors (For Cheap)

Master Sgt. David Dines changes out the film aboard an OC-135B Open Skies observation aircraft, Jan. 16, 2010. Photo: U.S. Air Force

You may have noticed that the Pentagon is crying poverty. So when the Air Force dreams up its next decade’s worth of imagery and sensor technology, it wants it all for cheap.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Air Force’s imaging and targeting support directorate let it be known it’s looking for the next generation of tools for geospatial (GEOINT) imagery. Everything’s on the table, hardware and software, and so the Air Force is dreaming big. According to a request for information about what’s technologically feasible, aimed at the defense industry and academics, it wants tools for “GEOINT in anti-access, denied areas”; for tracking and characterizing data taken from “underground facilities”; for identifying concealed and camouflaged targets; and it wants them to “significantly exceed current bandwidth and onboard data storage requirements.”

It’s an ambitious step forward, even considering the advanced sensors and cameras that the Air Force is already developing. The “GEOINT sensors, associated on-board data algorithms and components supporting a functional end-to-end GEOINT architecture” are supposed to maintain the Air Force’s edge through 2024. Just one thing: The Air Force isn’t going to pay you much for it.

Funding over the next two years is “uncertain,” given the budget woes of the current Congressional dysfunction about automatic spending cuts and the inability for the past year to even pass the defense budget President Obama submitted in February. So the Air Force’s imagery and targeting managers are “seeking 1-3 year projects that require funding of less than $1.5 million per year.”

To give a sense of scale here, check out the Pentagon’s contracts announcements from, say, Tuesday. In one day, the Air Force gave defense giant Lockheed Martin $58 million for the Space Based Infrared Systems Follow-on Production Program; and another $49.6 million to Lockheed for a global-strike software suite. Sure, that’s not exactly an apples-to-apples measure, but it does show how much cash the Air Force still has to dole out.

Yet the Air Force’s pleading for cheap advanced research reflects the sheer terror that Pentagon budget officials feel. In his advance testimony to the Senate, defense secretary-nominee Chuck Hagel lamented a potential loss of “$40 billion from our budget in a little over half a year” — the last defense bill Congress passed was $530.6 billion, excluding war spending — and “20 percent cuts in the Department’s operating budgets.” Earlier this month, the services started preemptively cutting their own budgets to prepare for the shock of automatic cuts scheduled for March 1.

It so happens that’s the same day the Air Force wants white papers from researchers about all the new geo-spatial gear they’d like to design. Research was probably always going to get the short end of the budgetary stick, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta let it be known earlier this month that he’d prioritize cash for the Afghanistan war. But if the researchers show that they can pull off the specs for the next generation of Air Force imagers on a relative pittance, the Air Force might have to start explaining why it’s paid so much for some of its other sensing tools.